"Well, I'm offering you a chance to suffer two thousand dollars' worth." Pauline's tact was proof even against that.
"You Comedy Child!" she laughed indulgently.
"You're getting ideas," Henry burbled on cheerfully; "all these long-hairs and high-brows you've been associating with, they've filled you up. That friend of yours, McDermott, somebody had him to the club the other day, talking about the conservation of Genius. Nothing in it. Let them work for their money the same as other people, I say."
"You know you didn't have any money to begin with," Pauline reminded me. I was made to feel it a consideration that she hadn't pressed the point that if I couldn't do again what I had done then, there was something lacking in the application. They must have taken my gesture of despair for surrender.
"I guess you were just getting it out of your system," Henry surmised comfortably.
It was not the first nor the last time that I was to come squarely up against the lay conviction that whatever might be known about the processes of art, it wasn't the artist that knew it. Later, when Henry took me out to the car, he came round to what had been back of the whole conversation.
"I suppose you could use more money in your business; most of us could," he advised me, "but you don't want to let people find it out. There's nothing turns men against a woman so much as to have her always thinking about money."
It was a very cold night as I came down the side street to my door, deserted as a country road. The narrow footpath trodden in the pavement looked like the track of desolation, the cold flare of the lamps was smothered in sodden splashes of snow. There had been the feeling of uneasiness in the air that goes before a storm all that forenoon, and in the interval that I had been revaluing a lifelong friendship in terms of what it wouldn't do for me, it had settled down to a heavy clogging snow. I was startled as I turned in at the entry to find a man behind me. He had come up unsuspected in the soft shuffle and turned in with me.
By the light that filtered through the weather-fogged transom I saw that he was Griffin of the Varieté. Now as I fumbled blindly at the latch he came close to me.
"Beg pardon!" He had put out his hand over mine and turned the key for me.